1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the management of messaging platforms that are interconnected to form a wide-area network.
2. Background
A messaging system as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,568,540 to Greco et. al., enables a user to receive messages having a voice mail format either through a telephone or through a personal computer (“PC”) coupled to a local area network (LAN). It also provides a graphical user interface (“GUI”) on the PC to select which voice mail messages to receive and in what order. However, the messaging system in Greco is a stand-alone system and thus, does not provide the advantages of linking to other similar messaging systems or of using interconnected messaging systems to provide distributed messaging.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to integrate messaging platforms distributed on a switchable communications backbone such as the Internet, or equivalent network such as a wide area corporate intranet, and connected to different area networks so as to provide global yet low cost messaging.
Moreover, it would be desirable to monitor each messaging platform and administer the addition, deletion, and updating of a messaging platform in response to a status change to the messaging platform so that each messaging platform is aware of the status change.
In addition, it would be desirable to minimize the complexity that would result if every independent owner of a messaging platform had to contract with every other independent owner of a messaging platform in order to deliver a message within a certain service area served by a messaging platform by imposing a cost tracking scheme on each messaging platform that uses the switched backbone to send a message to another messaging platform for delivery to the service area.
Furthermore, it would be desirable to provide a feature that manages a status message destined for a messaging platform which does not have an active connection to the switched backbone so that the status message is promptly delivered to the messaging platform the next time it re-establishes a connection to the switched network and results in a message confirming delivery of the status message to the messaging platform.
Last, it would be desirable to include an information delivery service that delivers a message from at least one source outside of the messaging network to a subscriber via the subscriber's messaging platform regardless of whether the messaging platform has a dedicated or dial-up connection.